His death was announced by the Ingmar Bergman Foundation.

Bergman was widely considered one of the greatest directors in motion picture history. For much of the second half of the 20th century, he stood with directors like Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa at the pinnacle of serious filmmaking.

He moved from the comic romp of lovers in Smiles of a Summer Night in 1955 to the Crusader's death-haunted search for God in The Seventh Seal in 1957; from the harrowing portrayal of fatal illness in Cries and Whispers in 1972 to the alternately humorous and horrifying depiction of family life a decade later in Fanny and Alexander.

For many filmgoers and critics, it was Bergman more than any other director who brought a new seriousness to filmmaking in the 1950s.

"Bergman was the first to bring metaphysics religion, death, existentialism to the screen," Bertrand Tavernier, the French film director, said. "But the best of Bergman is the way he speaks of women, of the relationship between men and women."

He influenced many other filmmakers, including Woody Allen, who once called Bergman "probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera."

Bergman made about 50 films over more than 40 years. He centred his work on two great themes the relationship between the sexes and the relationship between mankind and God. In a Bergman film, the mind is constantly seeking, constantly inquiring, constantly puzzled.

He carried out a simultaneous career in the theatre, becoming a director of Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theatre. He married multiple times and had highly publicised and passionate liaisons with his leading ladies.

Bergman had been a director for 10 years but was little known outside Sweden. Then, in 1956, Smiles won a special prize at the Cannes International Film Festival. The next year, the haunting and eloquent Seventh Seal, with its memorable medieval vision of a knight (Max von Sydow) playing chess with death in a world terrorised by the plague, won another special prize at Cannes. And in 1959, The Magician took the special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival.

Audiences flocked to art cinemas all over the world to see his films. Then, in 1960, The Virgin Spring told of a rape and its mysterious aftermath in medieval Scandinavia; it won the Academy Award as best foreign film. In only a few years, he had become both a cult figure and a box-office success.

Source: The New York Times